Should We Write 10 Articles a Day?

I could write ten articles in one day, if I needed to, but I can’t imagine why I would need to.  Except maybe if people call me on the first sentence of this article and I need to do it to prove I’m not full of it, but the fact is, I’m confident enough in my ability to run my mouth that I’m willing to stick my neck out there.

However, I question whether we should try to write ten articles a day, because unless we already know the subjects we’re writing on very well, it’s extremely difficult to write ten good articles a day.  We could finish or publish ten good articles on the same day if they were already almost ready to go, but that’s completely different from writing them from scratch.  If we try to write ten articles in what time we have left from other things (such as our day jobs or domestic responsibilities) over the course of a day, and allow ourselves some time for reading and gathering ideas, then we will have somewhere in the neighborhood of ten or fifteen minutes for each article, including specific research, actual writing, and revising/proofreading/editing.  If you want to know the quality of article that would produce, set a timer try it yourself, on a random subject you have only a passing acquaintance with (since most of us are not experts at enough topics to sustain output anywhere near 10 articles a day).

Jimmy Shilaho’s article on writing ten articles a day has some good advice, such as typing faster, examining trends in keywords, and reading in order to keep the idea tanks bubbling.  However, he errs by suggesting that writing 10 articles a day, even by these means, is desirable.  The internet’s signal-to-noise ratio is already reasonably awful, with a whole lot of junk to wade through any time we want to find out about anything; only modern search engines make it possible.  Although there’s nothing wrong with writing some quick, easy articles just because we like to be published, we need to think through what we’re trying to accomplish.  If our goal is to improve as writers or write articles which others will enjoy or find useful, it is better for us to write fewer articles but spend more time on each in order to write it better.  Conversely, if we are trying to get many page views or make money, it works better to write fewer articles and promote them more.  Ten articles a day will not be productive for either of these types of goals.

In summation, feel free to take advice on how to write more efficiently, but feel free not to set a misguidedly high purely numerical goal that involves sacrificing quality.